One of the most spectacular walks in literature is told in the book “Walking on Ice” by Werner Herzog (Paz e Terra; 104 p.). The little book, which turns 50 in 2024, is a dry account of the saga of the obsessive German film director.
Herzog is known for his raptures, most notably in the productions of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of the Gods. In both of those films, he faces the revolt of thousands of extras, exhausted from pushing a ship through the muddy mountains of the Amazon, and still struggles with the actor he hates so much, Klaus Kinski, his best friend .
Well, in 1974, at the age of 32, after the release of The Riddle of Kasper Hauser, Herzog was already considered one of the best directors of the new German generation when he found out about the serious illness of a friend Lotte Eisner. who lived in Paris.
He reluctantly denies Lotte the right to die. Through some inexplicable mental mechanism, Herzog decides to go to Paris, as a sacrifice, as a pilgrimage, as a desperate act. As long as she walked, she would not die. The passage is both beautiful and frightening: ‘She cannot die, she will not die, I will not let her. She won’t die, she won’t die. Not now, she doesn’t have the right.” By God! She can not. She will not die. When I get to Paris she will be alive.”
Moved by anger, fear, hope and perhaps madness, he leaves Munich and walks. Go angry. On the Way of St. James, it is common to cover 25 to 30 km a day on the wellsignposted path. Herzog runs almost 40 times a day, full of joint pains, in the face of a cold, rainy and sad winter, through snowy fields or menacing shoulders. “I crawl more than I walk. My legs hurt so much I can hardly put one in front of the other. How many are a million steps?”
His selfflagellation does not end here. He decides to spend the nights in any place he can break in. He breaks bolts, windows and shutters and goes into barns with damp hay, gatekeepers’ sentry boxes and even empty summer houses, where he meditates on the lives of the owners through photos. When he’s thirsty and he’s all the time he drinks milk, when hungry he eats everything from sausages to fruit he buys along the way. One day, alone in a snowstorm, he shakes an apple tree and eats apples until he is full.
loneliness weighs. After a few days, he’s already doubting his own humanity when he encounters people who avoid the smelly and sodden man. “No one in the world can imagine such abandonment by man. It’s the most desolate and loneliest day of all. So I went to shake the tree until it was finally empty. When I was done, a monstrous silence fell over me, I looked around and there was no one there. . I was alone.”
The journey evokes the great adventurers like Ernest Shackleton, the English navigator who lost his ship in Antarctica, but above all the great pilgrimages, the wanderers in search of a blessing or in gratitude for a grace received .
In Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Jerusalem or Juazeiro do Norte, tiredness purifies, vanity disappears in the face of pain, distance and tiredness. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims made a will before traveling as they risked not returning, being the victim of thieves or accidents. Everything is difficult, everything is coped with step by step.
The book is less of an inspiration to wander and more of a dive into the tormented soul of the man who has set a magical goal to save a life through his own suffering.
The walk ends in Paris. And what happens?
I’ve heard literary critics say there’s no spoiler for telling the ending of classic books, but I’d rather not say if Lotte was alive when the book came out.
Whoever reads the book will find out, but Herzog’s harsh and dry prose cannot hide the fact that this is one of the grandest walks and one of the greatest love gestures ever seen.